Baking!

Recently I've started to enjoy cooking a lot more than I used to. Since I've been living on my own with my boyfriend I've been cooking pretty much all of our evening meals. I definitely prefer to cook a homemade meal but sometimes when I get in at 6pm from my day at college I just can't be bothered to do much in terms of preparing dinner, so I tend to go for meals which are either instant of a lot simpler on a weekday night. But I do enjoy putting in some more effort when I've got more time at the weekends. I like trying out new recipes, but more often than not stick to the ones I know best. Since cooking the dinner every night has become more of a chore I've started to bake more which I do enjoy. I also thought that baking my own snacks to take for lunch at college would be cheaper than buying them ready made. I've made a lot of things recently: mincemeat crumble bars, gingernut biscuits, carrot muffins, chocolate chip cookies, to name just a few. So had thought of putting a few photos and recipes on here too.

A Carrot cake I made a long time ago.

As well as cooking the food I enjoying buying it. I love wandering round shops and looking at all they have to offer. I like shopping around to see where's cheapest. I also love to buy locally produced food, so I shop in a local fruit and veg shop, buy milk sourced nearby and buy free-range local eggs. I would like to start buying my meat from a local butcher as well. We live on a fairly tight budget as I don't really earn any money being a full-time student so I've found that it is also a lot cheaper to buy this way.